February 2017

02/06/2017

The Waterloo Regional Police Service investigation into the tragic cycling death of Robert Linsley continues.

Linsley is the 64-year-old man who was struck from behind on King Street near Conestoga Mall on Thursday, Feb. 2 when a motorist was entering King Street from the Highway 85 off-ramp.

The driver remained at the scene and emergency services were called, but Linsley was declared dead in hospital.

As the police continue to look for witnesses (contact Waterloo Regional Police Service Traffic Branch at 519-650-8500 ext. 8856 if you have dash-cam video of this event or were a witness), the community that knew him is grieving his loss.

The 64-year-old Linsley was an artist, author, lecturer and entrepreneur, who made his home in Waterloo Region in 2002, moving here from British Columbia to teach Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo until 2007. He was married to Yvonne Ip, a board member of the Grand Valley Society of Architects, and had three children.

His career as an abstract artist took him to showings in Barcelona and Berlin, as well as galleries in Canada.

He was a fixture in the artistic community here, where he was involved with CAFKA. He published several publications on, and lectured about, abstract art, and was a familiar figure at Communitech where, through a company he co-founded, Phototechnica, was developing technology intended for photographers who wanted to enhance lighting effects in post-production.

According to his brother, Mark, Linsley was a lifelong cyclist who chose to cycle-commute. He was on his way to his work when he was killed.

In a 2011 interview with then-arts writer of The Waterloo Region Record, Robert Reid, Linsley called himself a “big booster” of Kitchener-Waterloo, and said that he was attracted to the region when the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics opened its research program in 2001. Linsley told Reid that researchers at the institute influenced his art as he explored “the contact points between painting and theoretical physics.”

Linsley’s blog, Newabstraction.net, reviewed the work of other abstract artists, and poignantly, features two articles that were posted posthumously. Friends and family are posting condolences to his Facebook page. According to a post from his brother, Linsley’s remains will taken to B.C. for a memorial.

The police investigation, as I mentioned, is continuing.

Merges and diverges are among the great dangers for cyclists. Especially merges, where the driver entering the main roadway from a ramp will tend to check behind and to the left for overtaking traffic, without realizing that there is traffic, in the form of a cyclist, in the roadway ahead.

That is not to say that this is what happened in this instance. See the CTV report from last week for the observation that visibility was not an issue.